More than 30 million people have downloaded Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday (Jul 6).
The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday and will run with no ads for now, but its release in Europe has been delayed over data privacy concerns.
Threads is emerging as the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, as it took advantage of its access to billions of Instagram users and a similar look to that of its rival.
Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman, as well as companies like Netflix, Spotify and Amazon.
Its arrival comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Musk have traded barbs for months, even threatening to fight each other in a real-life mixed martial arts cage match in Las Vegas.
“The cage match has started, and Zuckerberg delivered a major blow. In many ways, it’s exactly what you’d expect from Meta: Stellar execution and an easy-to-navigate user interface,” Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said.
Twitter responded on Thursday by threatening to sue Meta, according to the publication Semafor, citing a letter delivered to Zuckerberg by a lawyer for Twitter.
Meta said no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.
Numerous competitors to Twitter have sprung up following Musk’s US$44 billion purchase of the social media platform last year, which was followed by a series of chaotic decisions that have alienated both users and advertisers. Musk’s latest move involved limiting the number of tweets users can read per day.
Twitter’s stumbles make room for a well-funded competitor like Meta Platforms, analysts and experts said, particularly because of its access to Instagram users and its advertising strength.
“Meta’s release of Threads came at the perfect time to give it a fighting chance to unseat Twitter,” said Niklas Myhr, professor of marketing at Chapman University, referring to the turmoil at Twitter after it limited the number of tweets users can see.
“Threads will be off to a running start as it is built upon the Instagram platform with its massive user base and if users adopt Threads, advertisers will be following closely behind.”
Other competitors have found limited success. Mastodon, another Twitter-like app, has 1.7 million monthly active users, according to its website, while Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky has about 265,000 users.
Twitter had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022, according to a statement made before Musk’s buyout.
